Laura Dowling

Intimate health.

We're talking about incontinence, we're talking about prolapse, we're talking about vaginal changes as you go through perimenopause and menopause, postnatal changes, and sex and sexuality.

This is right.

Yeah.

So as women in Ireland, Irish women, you know, growing up in Catholic Ireland, we would never have been encouraged to discuss our vaginas, our vulvas.

We didn't even know the names of, you know, we'd use the word vagina for our entire genitalia, which is actually the vulva.

There's loads more to it.

So we never would have discussed that.

We never would have discussed even sex as a part of pleasure in your life.

It was always just reproduction.

And that then doesn't give women the language that when things go wrong or if there's a problem that they just don't discuss it.

They don't know how to discuss it.

So they just put up with it because it's considered to be women's problems in quotation marks.

And women were never encouraged to talk about their vaginas and their vulvas or their intimate health.

And as a result, then they just put up with it.

Like I would have known women that for years were just wearing big thick pads because they may have been leaking vaginas.

And one in two women will leak postmenopause.

That's a huge statistic.

That's 50% of women will have some kind of urinary incontinence.

And it's one in three then after having a baby.